Chapter 10
SIMONE WAS LYING ON HER STOMACH on a mattress that felt like a cloud. Sunlight streamed through the window, warming her smooth, bare skin.
Buzzzzzzzzzzz.
Her lips curled into a smile at the sound of the vibrator. She parted her legs.
Buzzzzzzzzzzz.
Simone shivered as the wand grazed the inside of her knee before tracing its way up her thigh at a teasingly unhurried pace.
The higher it wandered up her thigh, the more the pressure mounted between her legs.
She ground her pelvis into the mattress, aching to relieve it, but the mattress was too soft, and she moaned, wanting more.
She arched her back, lifting her ass in the air—anything to get the wand where she wanted it.
Buzzzzzzzzzzz.
The vibrator was close enough to her core that its rumbling radiated to her clit, like ripples in the surface of a pool. But she needed more than gentle lapping; she needed a tidal wave of pleasure to crash into her and sweep her away. Again, she arched her back, desperate for more contact…
“Please,” she murmured.
“You’re so stunning,” a low voice said back.
Buzzzzzzzzzzz.
“Please,” she moaned again.
“Not yet. Let me look at you first.”
“Ryan, please…”
Buzzzzzzzzzzz.
Wait. That buzzing wasn’t a vibrator. It was the morning alarm Simone had set on her phone, which was vibrating on the bedside table in her Whistler hotel room.
Her body slick with sweat, Simone extracted herself from the damp tangle of bedsheets and scrambled to shut it off.
Before she went to meet Ryan at the gondola, she needed to get in the shower.
She was soaked—and not just with sweat. She’d been this close to having an actual orgasm in her sleep… and with Ryan’s name on her lips.
Fuck, she thought.
She’d spent so many years resisting her heart’s truest desires before she’d finally summoned the courage to come out.
At long last, she was ready and excited to be with women—which was why it felt like a cruel and unusual punishment that the person she seemed to desire more than anyone else was Ryan.
Ryan, who happened to be a straight, male, flannel-wearing carpenter.
Being into him felt like a waste of an opportunity.
Simone cranked the faucet to the coldest setting.
She gritted her teeth as she stepped into the shower and the icy water bit her skin.
She remembered an Instagram Reel she’d seen about sleep orgasms, and how you had a higher chance of having one if you were lying on your stomach, with your most sensitive parts pressed against the mattress.
Simone would be sleeping on her back for the rest of the trip.
SHE SQUINTED UP AT THE SKY through the window of the gondola. “It’s not as a sunny today, eh?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “It’s windier, too.”
“D’you think it’ll snow?”
“Maybe.”
Simone was fully aware that she was asking the dullest questions imaginable, but between the flirting practice and the sex dream, there was a fire in her belly for Ryan that she was eager to stamp out.
Soon, she’d be back in Toronto, where she wouldn’t have to see him all the time, and it would be easier to focus on meeting women.
Until then, she’d work hard to keep things strictly platonic between the two of them.
How ironic, Simone thought wryly. This trip would have been easier if he were still my nemesis.
They rode the first few chairlifts of the day with other members of their guide group.
They talked with Margot and Thea about what it was like spending their summers in Australia and their winters in Canada so they could ski all year long; with Glen about how he’d founded a nonprofit called Loving Minds that provided mental health care to the queer community in Toronto; with Phoenix about their experience coming out as nonbinary just a month before Simone had come out as bi; and with Roberto and Luis about the differences between skiing in the Rockies and the Andes.
Simone thoroughly enjoyed these conversations, not just because she was deepening her connections with her new friends, but also because they pulled her away from Ryan.
Noon was already approaching when Simone and Ryan ended up alone on a chairlift together for the first time all morning. It was a three-seater, and Simone made sure to leave a healthy gap between their bodies.
As they rose into the air, Ryan lowered the safety bar. It landed with a thunk, made even louder by the silence between them.
“Hey,” Ryan said. There was a tentative note in his voice that made Simone nervous and even a little embarrassed, like there was a chance Ryan knew about the sex dream, even though that was impossible.
“What’s up?” she asked.
He pulled his goggles up onto his helmet so he could look at her directly. “I just wanted to make sure that you were okay.”
“Why wouldn’t I be okay? I’m totally fine! Look where we are!” She gestured at the mountains, trying to come off as easy and breezy as possible.
“You don’t seem fine,” he said matter-of-factly, “and I wanted to make sure I didn’t cross a line with any of the flirting stuff last night.”
Simone dropped the easy-and-breezy act. “Oh my God, Ryan, no.” She generally enjoyed putting Ryan in his place, but she couldn’t let him think he’d done something wrong when in reality he’d been trying to help her embrace her queerness.
The only thing he’d done “wrong” last night was cast a spell on Simone that made her think about kissing him.
She couldn’t tell him that, though. “You didn’t cross a line at all. ”
“You sure?”
“Ryan, I promise.” Sighing, she racked her brain, knowing she still needed an explanation for why she’d been awkward all morning. Eventually, an idea came to her. “Pretending to flirt made me think about my ex,” she said. “It put me in bit of a funk, I guess.”
She could see the relief in Ryan’s posture, but his voice still had traces of concern. Concern for her. “The person you said you broke up with last year?”
“Yeah. Bree. We were never official, so I don’t know if I can really call her my ex, but I liked her a lot, and the breakup, or whatever you wanna call it, was really bad.”
“What happened?” he asked.
Her relationship with Bree was still a sore spot for Simone.
Somewhere deep down, she was pretty sure she still had feelings for her former coworker, but they were vastly outweighed by shame over the way she’d acted.
She wished she could carve out the memory of their fight the way you sliced the bruise off a banana.
Simone turned to Ryan with a grimace on her face.
“Let’s just say I was still insisting I was straight the entire time we were together. ”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Not ideal.”
“But then you came out.”
She nodded. “A few months after we ended things. She said I’d never be happy if I kept lying to myself, and eventually, I realized she was right.”
“Does she know?”
“That I came out? I don’t think so.” They hadn’t spoken since the fight, and Bree had unfollowed Simone on Instagram. Simone had considered getting in touch—maybe sending Bree a link to her coming-out post—but she was still so ashamed of her behavior that she’d chickened out every time.
But now that Simone was thinking about it again, she realized there was a chance that Bree had seen her post. They still had a bunch of mutuals from their old job, and didn’t the algorithm sometimes show you popular posts from friends of friends?
Maybe Bree had seen the post. Maybe she’d even liked it, and Simone had missed her name among the hundreds of notifications.
“You know what? I should actually check to make sure.”
Simone plunged her mitten into the pocket of her parka, grabbed her phone, and pulled it out as fast as she could. She didn’t consider how risky it was to take your phone out on a chairlift, or that it was even riskier to do while wearing thick mittens that made it hard to grip objects.
At least, she didn’t consider these things until the phone slipped from her grasp and bounced off her snow pants. She and Ryan gasped in unison as it plummeted through the air, then watched helplessly as it disappeared into a thicket of trees at least fifty feet below them.
“Oh no!” Simone cried. She twisted around in the chair, trying to memorize where her phone had fallen.
With a flicker of hope, she noticed the trees that had swallowed it were next to a run.
The drop hadn’t been that far, and if it had landed in the plants or a pile of snow or something, there was a chance it had survived the fall.
When they reconvened with their guide group at the top of the chairlift, Simone explained to Margot what had just happened. “It’s in the trees at the side of the run we just crossed over on the lift,” she said. “Can we ski down there so I can look for it?”
Margot gazed toward the run and bit her bottom lip. “My concern is that it’s a double black, and it’s gnarly. A mate of mine tore his ACL there a couple of years ago.”
“Oooh, I remember that,” Thea added with a wince.
“If you wanna ski down there on your own, you’re more than welcome to try it out, but I don’t think I can risk taking the group there,” Margot said with a quick glance at Glen, who was back on the mountain but trying to take it easy after his fall. “I’m so sorry.”
Simone considered her options. She’d skied a few double blacks before, and she’d like to at least try to get her phone back. “I think I’m gonna go down there and have a look,” she decided aloud.
“You want me to come with?” Ryan asked immediately.
“It’s super dangerous.”
“Although it is a good idea to ski with a buddy,” Margot chimed in. Thanks, Margot.
“I’ll be all right,” Ryan said. “I’ve been skiing a long time.”
Simone gazed toward the run. She wasn’t exactly eager to spend alone time with Ryan in the woods. What if he decided to be irresistibly attractive again? But she really did need all the assistance she could get. She turned back to Ryan. “You sure?”
“Let me help you, Simone.”